Cosmic Stories

John 12:20-36

March 18, 2018

There’s a lot going on in the world these days. So much tugs for attention, and it’s so easy to give in to distraction. It can all be overwhelming. I can’t quite imagine what Jesus must have felt like at the point of the story we catch up with this morning: he’s in Jerusalem – John’s account of Palm Sunday immediately precedes the passage we just read so we’re slightly out of sync here on the fifth Sunday of Lent. But that’s OK.

The crowds are growing, pressing in on all sides, and then “some Greeks” show up, apparently curious about the man at the center of the storm that was blowing through the city threatening that most frightening of all human conditions: change.

They just wanted to come and see for themselves. I think a lot of folks who flocked toward Jesus wanted to see something different from the way things were. But at this late date, the texts suggest, Jesus was beyond “come and see.”

If you recall, that phrase, that invitation, was how Jesus called the first disciples in John’s gospel. Jesus simply asked them, “what are you looking for?” And then said, “come and see.”

Some Greeks were looking for something, and they approach Philip, to whom Jesus had said, back in those simpler early days, “come and see.”

Philip, apparently a good Presbyterian, decides to form a committee. He goes to Andrew, to whom also Jesus had said, “come and see.” One imagines Roberts Rules emerging from the conversation between Philip and Andrew: “I move that we take the Greeks to see Jesus.” “I offer the substitute motion that we take the idea of the Greeks to Jesus.” “Shall the substitute motion become the main motion?” “So ordered.”

So, the ones who had heard, “come and see,” basically tell the Greeks, “sit and wait.” Then they go to tell Jesus about the Greeks.

Then things get weird. “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” And off Jesus goes.

This convoluted tale raises several questions that resonate for us:

First: Who gets to show Jesus, and how? Second: Who gets to see Jesus? And, third: what time is it, really?

Answering that first question – who gets to show Jesus – is one of the daunting challenges regularly poorly met by the organized church. That is to say, the institutional church has struggled for millennia to determine who shall be authorized to proclaim the gospel, to, in essence, show Jesus to the world.

The largest single part of the institutional church – the Roman Catholic part – has determined for centuries now that only unmarried, celibate men can be credentialed to show Jesus to the world. The Protestant part of the church, from its earliest days, opened the way for married men to become clergy. John Calvin, for example, was married during his years in Strasbourg, and he, along with many other early Reformers railed against the imposed celibacy of the Catholic priesthood.

If you think about that for even a solid second, you’ll see clearly that a religious movement grounded in the priesthood of all believers cannot long survive a celibate priesthood.

That, of course, was far from the final struggle over who can be authorized to proclaim the gospel by the institution of the church. In the past century, the Protestant church has struggled, schismed itself to pieces, and step by excruciatingly slow step authorized first women, then GLBTQ persons to be ordained to church offices.

Of course, even this extremely abbreviated side-trip through the history of ordination ought to raise for us the broader question of what it means to show Jesus to the inquiring world. That is to say, if “some Greeks” show up in our midst asking to see Jesus, how would we show them?

Last year I got to have lunch with Bishop Gene Robinson, and I’ll always recall his simple observation: people come to us seeking an encounter with Jesus and, instead, we give them the church.

I want to spend a couple of minutes in conversation about how we show Jesus to the world, but before we get to that, I want to touch briefly on the second question I raised earlier: who gets to see Jesus? That is also to ask, “who are these Greeks”? In the text, “some Greeks” is likely the author’s shorthand way of referring to the Gentile world, to the wider world beyond Jesus’ Jewish milieu, and certainly outside of his smaller circle of followers. That would have been a typical use of “Greeks.” For our purposes, we might say “some unchurched folks” or “some nones” – that’s N-O-N-E-S “nones,” as in those who check the “none” box in surveys asking about religious affiliation – dropped by and asked to see Jesus.

How would we respond? How do we show Jesus to the world? To begin with, it’s good to keep in mind the line that we print in the bulletin every single Sunday that names the ministers of the church. I’ll give you a couple of seconds to find that line ….

So, we share a common conviction that whatever it may mean to show Jesus to the world such ministry is our shared responsibility. We also understand, as the passage from Hebrews underscores, that Jesus offers the model for us to follow as the “high priest” of this priesthood of all. So, how do we do this? How do we show Jesus to the world?

* * * * *

That’s a fine beginning of an answer to the first complicated question: who gets to show Jesus and how do we do it? As to the second question, who gets to see Jesus, it is possible that the author of John also intended that “some Greeks,” in addition to representing the wider Gentile world, also represent folks most interested in the philosophical/theological question: who is Jesus?

Jesus response – “the hour is getting late” – suggests that the more pressing question is my third one: what time is it?

One could read the entirety of the gospel of John as a meditation on that question and on the nature of time. After all, the text starts with: “In the beginning was the Word,” and it ends with what I like to think of as the library at the end of the universe: “there are also many other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

In between, the author regularly includes references to time in setting the stories he does tell, and while Jesus is not in as much of a hurry in John as he seems to be in Mark – where everything happens “immediately” – he still knows the answer to that fundamental question: what time is it?

In the text this morning the answer is clear: the time for coming and seeing has past. Now it is time to come and follow.

Jesus understands the moment in terms of God’s time, Kairos time – it is a time to decide. That’s what makes this a cosmic story, a story the scale of the cosmos. Recall that in perhaps the best-known single verse in all of Christian scripture – John 3:16 – kosmos is what God so loves. The whole of creation – all of space and time, for now and for all time.

Jesus is concerned with cosmic questions because he understands the fierce urgency of now.

We tend to live our lives as if the steady tick-tock of the hours provides a comforting rhythm to the gentle flow of endless time that will always include us, until we wake up to the reality of our present time. The details of present disruptions to anything like a “gentle flow” is way too long for one Sunday morning, and even a simple list would take more time than we have.

In that context, the name given to next weekend’s action to reduce gun violence strikes me as perfectly appropriate to this moment: the March for Our Lives.

The kids providing the driving energy to respond to the massive disruption that gun violence is in America see time the same way Jesus did. It’s too late to come and see; it is time to stand up and follow.

There’s a reason they didn’t call the action next Saturday the March for Marginal Improvements to School Safety or the March for Incremental Changes to Gun Laws. They are marching for their lives.

We might want to keep that name in mind with respect to so much else that makes our time so fraught. After all, when we stand up to do justice, when we lean in to love with kindness, and when we walk humbly with our God, then we are marching for our lives.

When queer folks and allies flocked to the steps of the Supreme Court prior to marriage equality hearings, we understood that we were marching for our lives. When women organized people around the world last January, we understood that we were marching for our lives. When people of color and allies rose up to oppose white supremacists in Charlottesville last August, we understood that we were marching for our lives. When the Presbyterian Peace Fellowship joined Fossil-Free PCUSA to organize the climate justice walk from Louisville to St. Louis this June, we understood that we would be marching for our lives.

“Marching,” of course, is a metaphor, standing in for all that we do to strengthen and celebrate life in the midst of a culture of death, to create and sustain beauty in the midst of the ugliness of our time, and to build bridges of welcome to the immigrant and stranger when the powerful ones would prefer to build walls. When people come asking to see Jesus, if we want to show them Jesus, let us say, “come and follow; we are marching for our lives.” Amen.